How Will You Spend Your First Week of Trump? The Root and Branch Revue Offers Lessons in Resistance

We've got the first three scheduled events for the 2017 version of our Root and Branch Revue nailed down for next month and they all offer a chance for you to contribute to the resistance of the anti-environmental, anti-democratic aganda of the Trump Administration, right out of the box:


Tuesday, January 24th

 

7-9 pm

 

Angelika Theater @Mockingbird

 

Film Screening and Panel Discussion

 

 

"When is Civil Disobedience Effective?"   

 

FREE

                                                                                       

Film Screening : "Above All Else" is a firsthand account of the dramatic 2012 East Texas Keystone XL Pipeline Blockade. What began as a stand by one landowner became a frontline action for the nationwide climate change movement. Many DFW residents participated in this action and some of them will be there at the Angelika on Tuesday. 

 

Panel discussion afterward includes:  

Mavis Belisle, veteran peace activist

Peter Johnson, veteran civil rights activist

Corey Toriani, East Texas Keystone Blockader 

Moderated by Jim Schermbeck, Downwinders at Risk 

 

Co-Sponsored by the Dallas Peace Center

 


Thursday, Janaury 26th

 

7-9 pm

 

Mountain View College Performance Hall

 

"Flint Comes to Dallas –

 

Or Is It Already Here?

 

An Evening with the Women Who Broke the Flint Scandal Wide Open

– and Their DFW peers

 

FREE

 

Featured Guests from Flint:

Melissa Mays – founder, "Water You Fighting for?" citizens group in Flint. Melissa is respsonsible for inviting scientists from Virginia Tech to do independent water testing in hundreds of households in Flint. Those test results are what finally made the government take notice of the largescale lead poisoning taking place in Flint. 

Nayyiriah Shariff  – an organizer for the Flint Democracy Defense League and an advisor to Black Lives Matter. 

DFW residents who've fought their own local lead contamination fights: 

Luis Sepulveda – founder, West Dallas Environmental Coaliton for Environmetnal Justice, former Justice of the Peace

Colette McCadden, co-founder, Frisco Unleaded

Moderator: Randy Lee Loftis: Texas Climate News, former Environmental Reporter for the Dallas Morning News. Mr. Lofits has written about the lead contmaination problem in West Dallas and Frisco for the Morning News, and more recently covered Flint for National Geopgraphic. 

 



Saturday, January 28th

 

9:30 am to 5:30 pm

 

1-Day University of Change  

 

Bluebonnet Ballroom

 

inside UTA's University Center

 

at the Arlignton Campus

 

 

A full day of skills and info workshops

 

with lunch included, for only $35!

 

Worshops Include:

Health Survey Dos and Don'ts

High Tech Tools for Citizens

Do-it-Yourself Water Testing

Basic Door-to Door Outreach

Petition Rights

Making Violations Stick

Fighting Permits in Texas

 ________________________________________________________________

Special lunchtime panel discussion among local elected officials:

"How Do Local Governments Protect Their Quality of Life Goals

in the Trump Era?"

Participants include Dallas County Commissioner Teresa Daniel and Dallas City Council Member Sandy Greyson with more to come.

 

Limited Seating. Register now for the 1-Day University of Change Here.

 

 

Be Where Your Feet Are

Dear Downwinders, 

Based on position papers, advisors, and now job offers, it's hard to overestimate the harm to the environment that can and will be done by a Trump Administration. Your first response may be to already feel defeated by the enormity of the challenges now facing us. 

Don't let those feelings get the best of you. 

What happened on Election Day was unexpected, but history is always so.Consider the odds against a black man named Hussein winning the Presidency in 2008. The unpredictable nature of history is what gives us hope. This moment won't last. The future isn't written yet. Even now there are important tipping points waiting for you to make them happen. But you must show-up. 

We don't say this as Pollyannas unschooled in the difficulties of working in a hostile political atmosphere. We say it BECAUSE we've worked in the political wilderness of Texas for over twenty years and won some of our biggest victories when awful political circumstances would tell you our chances ranged from slim to none. 

Certainly there'll be national fights that have to be fought. Progress will be measured in how much we save as well as how much we advance. But the model of change Downwinders at Risk has followed since its founding, with its emphasis on local action, is more relevant than ever. 

We were already committed to building more local movement "infrastructure" before the elections, but those efforts seem doubly important now. 

Here are some examples of what we mean:

Our next "Root and Branch Revue" for environmental activists this coming January 24th-28th    We're going to be screening a film, sponsoring discussions, and hosting workshops – all with the aim of making you a better activist. This year's featured guests will be the women from Flint, Michigan who exposed that public health scandal by doing their own water testing.

Our work in building the North Texas Air Research Consortium with local universities and municipalities     This new high-tech network, co-founded by Downwinders, will provide the public with more and better information about air quality than either the state or federal government is even thinking about. Downwinders' part of this larger effort is our "North Texas CLEAN Air Force" that will use drones and sensors for mobile monitoring to fill data gaps, study specific facilities, or respond to accidents. 

Our semester-long "College for Constructive Hell-Raising"     Twice-a-month evening class from January to May that will offer intensive training in traditional community organizing techniques as well as an opportunity to hear stories from 50 years of social justice history in DFW. Our goal is to graduate students who will produce positive change across a variety of local issues and causes. 

All of these efforts concentrate on building community among the like-minded, not just online, but in person. We need strong networks and good relationships with our peers to survive and thrive, so if you feel impotent to do much about DC or Austin, get out of the house and vote with your feet in your own backyard. This is where you can do the most good. 

Here's a last unlikely scenario to consider: 

A local group of environmentalists whose volunteer board membership never numbers more than a dozen, and who receive no national or state support, manages to not only survive for two decades, but fields the only full-time staff person devoted to clean air in DFW and becomes the leading protector of regional air quality, winning battles with sheer persistence as much as anything else

That's the unexpected history that's happened because of support like yours in times like these. Please stick with us, and we promise we'll keep fighting for, and with, you. 

You can make your secure online tax deductible contribution here, or send a check to PO Box 763844 Dallas, TX 75376. 

Thanks for your continued support. See you in the New Year – and New Era. 

Jim Schermbeck, Director                                                

Tamera Bounds, Chair, Downwinders at Risk Education Fund

This is Your EPA. This is Your EPA on Trump…..

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There's some commentary out there, including unfortunately from within the EPA itself, suggesting that a Trump administration can't undue much of the nation's environmental regulations, no matter how determined his appointees might be to do so; that things won't be as bad as you fear. 

Don't buy it. It's exactly the kind of commentary that said Trump would never be elected in the first place. 

This isn't W. This isn't even Reagan. There's no shared world view, or even a rhetorical fig leaf devoted to the need for environmental protection. It's ISIS about to invade and systematically blow-up the nation's environmental safeguards because they don't believe in them. The Clean Air Act is a false idol. The Clean Water Act is blasphemy against an unfettered market. They must be demolished. 

Reassurances to the contrary, there are lots of ways to make sure EPA doesn't work. You don't have to repeal the Clean Air Act to make it impotent. As Grover Norquist commented, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Citizens know in the best of times, it's a chore to make the government enforce what's on the books. Imagine no interest at all in enforcement by EPA, where you still have federal regulations but their implementation is left entirely up to states, cities, or environmental groups. No money for attorneys or staff. All work out-sourced to contractors who are also getting paid by the polluters they're now regulating. 

Imagine EPA's scientific panels filled with Michael Honeycutts, the TCEQ's own professional apologist. There's not only no such thing as Climate Change, there's no such thing as smog. Or if there is, it turns out to be good for you! 

Over the weekend, reports surfaced of the Trump people literally taking names of EPA employees who've been directly involved in climate change work. He's not even president yet, but he already putting together an environmental enemies list. 

Staid observers are counting on bureaucratic inertia to help maintain business-as-usual. But these people are underestimating both the zeal and the intent of the new gang. They're here to destroy, not carry-on. Illusions to the contrary can only facilitate the destruction.

Wondering How to Respond? Look to Reagan-Era AIDS Activists

80s-aids-activismAt first blush it might seem strange to recommend Trump-era environmentalists undertake a crash course on Reagan-era AIDS activism, but this review of David France's book in the Washington Post makes a good case. 

Frances' How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS" is based on the 2012 documentary of the same name. Faced with political opposition based on cultural shaming at the highest levels of government using ideological fig leafs, the LGBT community in the 1980's had to fight for the very scientific legitimacy of the disease itself. It then had to organize its own treatment, and fight to fund new research. It had to fight the idea of AIDS as a "gay curse," educate about the new threat to everyone, and remind mainstream America the problem was closer than just the nearest gay bar downtown. 

To some of us, that's a pretty good description of the war against climate change activism we find ourselves confronting now. 

Just like AIDS deniers, there are climate change deniers. They don't even want to grant the most important fate-changing phenomenon of our times the legitimacy of reality.

At this point opposition to climate change is more cultural than political. It's a middle finger to the pointy-headed scientists and government regulators just looking to make a buck off selling the End of the World.

In the 1980's, survival of the LGBT community motivated a spectrum of responses to an uncharitable status quo. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, death has a way of focusing the mind. Everything from civil disobedience, to traditional lobbying, to the improbable idea of a giant silent quilt bearing profound testimony on the National Mall. Activists had to fight to even get on the radar of Big Science and Big Government. They did their own science and their own organizing. And from those contentious times grew something remarkable that would flourish and lead to the current status quo – marriage equality, anti-discrimination laws, huge national boycotts pushing back against attempts to re-institutionalize prejudice. 

Here's the nut graph of the piece:

"The book is also something of a how-to manual for activism. ACT UP agitators shut down the FDA, blocked access to drugmakers’ buildings, and even placed an enormous condom over Helms’s house. Their efforts built new and lasting bridges among activists, scientists and policy wonks while establishing a blueprint for social change. France was emphatic when he told me that the lesson from the AIDS era is a sweeping one: Against all odds, he declared, “empowerment and victory are possible.” That’s an important one to recall at the dawn of a Trump administration."

Survival is on the line again but there's a President-elect already on record as saying climate change is a hoax. What's the appropriate responses to such a basic level of uncomprehension? We're about to find out, but maybe we could save some time by going back and absorbing the lessons of the people who knew what it was like to fight with everything on the line and no friends in high places.